"That's enough. How do we get a handle on them?"

"Try American Society of Psychotherapists."

"Got you. Give me the numbers. Okay. Okay. Got them."

Kev: zero. Normal!

Debbie: zero. Normal!

Lucy: "I'm confused. Talk about flakes. What do you make of them?"

"One of three things. One, they're acting like normal married couples. Two, they're pathological, but the pathogen is not heavy sodium."

"Three?"

"Father Smith would say the pathogen is demonic."

"Demonic. I see. What do you say?"

"I say let's run some more."

We run a dozen more. We've got three negatives, the rest positive.

Lucy turns off all machines. Lights stop blinking. There are no sounds but the hum of lights. A screech owl's whimpers. It is three o'clock.

"I'm going to bed," I say. "Let's sleep on it."

"Wait wait wait."

"All right."

"I've got an idea."

"Okay."

"Do you know where these people live?"

"Sure."

"Okay. I'm going to give you a graphic, a map. Let's see how many we can locate. Maybe we can get a pattern."

"Let's do it tomorrow."

"It'll only take a second. Watch this."

She pops in a cassette and there's old Louisiana herself, a satellite view, color-coded, with blue lakes and bayous, silver towns and cities, rust-red for plowed fields, greens for trees-and the great coiling snake of the Mississippi.

"Now watch this."

The satellite zooms down. Here's Feliciana, from the Mississippi to the Pearl, from the thirty-first parallel to the Crayola blue of Lake Pontchartrain. I can even see the Bogue Falaya and Bayou Pontchatolawa, where I fished yesterday-was it yesterday?-with John Van Dorn.

"Here's your wand. Locate as many patients as you can."

Like Tinker Bell, I can touch the screen and make a star. I make a constellation. We gaze at it. It has no shape. It is a skimpy, ill-formed star cluster.

"How many questions will this thing answer?" I ask finally, hoping to stump it so I can go to bed.

"Almost any. It is a matter of framing the question."

"I can frame the question."

"Well?"

"It is a preposterous question."

"Ask it."

"There is no way it can be answered."

"Ask Hal. He's good."

"I want the computer to locate on this graphic every person in Feliciana Parish and adjoining parishes who has an elevated plasma level of heavy sodium-which is to say, any level of heavy sodium."

"Good Lord," says Lucy. She gazes at me. I seem to hear her own circuits firing away like Hal thinking things over. She taps her teeth with a pencil. She tugs absently at my Bean collar, brushes me off. She slaps the desk. "Well, why the hell not? It's a challenge. There are data banks which have the information. It's just a matter of latching on to it, right?"

"Right," I say wearily. Why did I ask?

"As a matter of fact," she muses, plucking a grain of tobacco from her tongue and taking my arm again, "there just might be a chance."

"There might be?"

"Sure. We got a five-thousand-baud system here."

"That ought to do it. What is a baud?"

"Never mind. There just might be a chance."

"Good."

"You know why?" She pulls close.

"Why?"

"Because. I seem to recall that when the Grand Mer unit was finished, it was after T.M.I. Then after Chernobyl NIH called for an EIS to placate the anti-nukes."

"What's an EIS?"

"Environmental Impact Study."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning a parish-wide sampling was done for radioactivity."

"You mean people were tested?"

"Sure. Urinalyses almost certainly. And it's just possible that they could have-" She jerks me. "Sodium would show up in the urine, wouldn't it?"

"Sure."

"It is just possible-" She searches my right eye, then my left. "Tell you what?"

"What?"

"Let's hit the mainframe in Baton Rouge and ask it to do the work. By God, there is just a chance."

"Let's do that."

She gazes, taps her teeth, plucks at her tongue. "Here's what we'll do. We'll do some networking. We'll use State Public Health and if necessary the Census Bureau and if necessary NIH in D.C. And we'll ask the mainframe in Baton Rouge to do the asking. I've got the authority."

"Okay."

"Now understand this. It won't be entirely accurate, because if there's a John Hebert who's positive, the census will give us half a dozen John Heberts right here in Feliciana. You understand?"

"I understand."

"But we'll get some sort of distribution."

"Great."

Another half hour of phone work, little-black-box work, page flipping, key hitting, user names, user codes, access codes, logging in, PIVs, Hal's initial outrage, user authorization denied, SNERROR, QUERY QUERY QUERY, NIX-Hal relenting, until finally there is a single meek little green-for-go o?.

"Okay what?" I ask.

"Cross your fingers."

"Okay."

She takes a breath. "Here we go."

"Well?"

"I'm afraid to hit the key," says Lucy, grabbing me, eyes round.

"Show me the key and I'll hit it."

She shows me the key, turns her face. I hit the key. Something is wrong.

It looks like a weather map. It looks like what happens when the TV weatherman switches to his satellite map of Louisiana streaked with cold fronts, upper level clouds, clear black sunshine.

"I don't get it, Lucy. What are we looking at?"

Lucy is laughing, eyes rounded, triumphant. She grabs me. "You don't get it. Okay, let's zoom in. What do you see now?"

"It looks like a weather front right on top of Feliciana. But there is no front.

"Look again." Zooming closer.

There is Feliciana as before and there are the clouds, closer, grainier. Now I see it. But surely not. It can't be. The clouds are particulate, galactic clouds of tiny twinkling stars, as if the screen had been hit by a handful of Christmas glitter. Part of Baton Rouge is a regular snowfield.

"Do you mean to tell me-" I begin, hardly believing what I see.

"I mean to tell you," says Lucy, face close, big-eyed, holding on to me like a ten-year-old.

"-that each dot is-"

"-a case of heavy sodium. I only asked for sodium. Every dot on that graphic is a person. You're looking at the actual geographical distribution of your syndrome."

There is nothing to do but gaze. "That's beautiful," I say finally. "You're beautiful."

"I know! I know!" She hugs me. "Oh, I'm so sorry about- but I'm also so glad about-"

I say nothing, gaze at the screen.

"Zoom back."

"Okay."

A single rack of clouds hangs over Feliciana like a warm front backed up from the Gulf. Strange: the lakefront is mostly clear, even though it's high-density population. Baton Rouge? Northwest quadrant of the city cloudy, central and south lightly speckled, a scattering of star clusters over Feliciana.

"What's the factor?" I ask Lucy. "You're the epidemiologist."

"I know, I know. It's under our noses. We're looking right at it and can't see it."

"Look harder."

"Look at that." She points to Baton Rouge. "It's a starry yin embracing a clear yang. It's telling us. It's practically shouting."

"You listen." I get up. The toddies and the time have caught up with me.

"You okay?" she asks, pulling me down, staring into one eye, then the other.

"I'm tired. Let's sleep on it."

"Don't leave." She takes my arm.

"I'm not going anywhere. See you in the morning. We'll talk about this stuff. Interesting."

"One thing," she says. We're standing in the dim hall.